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Lesbian Modernism I Hannah Roche

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Lesbian Modernism I Hannah Roche Day One | April 11th Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I Hannah Roche (University of York) Conceiving the Lesbian Hero: Radclyffe Hall, Adam’s Breed, and Modernism’s Queer Child. In 1927, just a year before the publication and trial for obscenity of The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s fourth novel achieved the unusual honour of winning both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Adam’s Breed (1926), which probes the psyche of a spiritually starved Italian-English waiter in Soho, raised Hall’s profile both as a writer and as a curiosity: public attention was drawn to the ‘distinctive figure in the literary world of London [who] is known everywhere for her Eton crop and her monocle’ (Daily News, 4th January 1928). Yet in spite of its considerable commercial success and remarkable critical acclaim, Adam’s Breed could not withstand the knock to Hall’s reputation dealt by the trial of The Well. Almost ninety years and a Virago Modern Classics edition (1985) later, Adam’s Breed has failed to secure a readership beyond the relatively small world of serious Hall criticism. This paper calls for the recognition of Adam’s Breed not only as a significant modern(ist) novel but also as an altogether necessary precursor to The Well. Expanding the category of ‘lesbian writing’, my paper raises important questions about how and why we might read lesbianism as the focus of an ostensibly ‘straight’ (and linear) novel. I explore the ways in which Hall’s preoccupation with breeds, not only as a keen dog-fancier but more weightily as a proponent of homosexuality as a congenital condition, is played out in Adam’s Breed’s essentialist take on national ‘types’. The crisis of identity faced by the novel’s hero, Gian-Luca, foreshadows Stephen Gordon’s struggle with sexual otherness. At the same time, both Gian-Luca and The Well’s Mary Llewellyn threaten to undermine the value of any distinction based on immutable type or genre. By emphasising the necessity of national and sexual categorisation whilst including characters who extend the boundaries of such categories, Hall simultaneously establishes and destabilises a typology model that embraces the possibility of pure or complete breeds. In her tender portrayal of Gian-Luca, an ‘outsider’ who ultimately fails to live within an often cruel society, Hall purposely prepares her readers’ sympathies for her next protagonist: the startlingly different Stephen Gordon. Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I Steven Macnamara (University of Nottingham) Radclyffe Hall’s Other Gay Novel: The Master of the House Radclyffe Hall is most commonly associated with the lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), but this paper will argue that her overtly religious novel, The Master of the House (1932) is a queer text that has largely been overlooked by LGBTQ+ communities and academics. Published in response to the publicity and notoriety Hall gained through The Well of Loneliness trial and its subsequent obscenity ban, The Master of the House was a commercial and critical failure and remains one of her least discussed works. The reimaged Christ story appears a rather dry and dull prospect compared to the perceived salacious and controversial lesbian storyline of The Well of Loneliness. However, The Master of the House is a covert male love story: a novel that explores unrequited, unrealised and unspoken love between men in the period leading up to the start of the First World War. It can be seen in the manuscripts that Hall, anxious not to be associated with another scandalous homosexual novel after The Well of Loneliness, attempted to redact the gay subtext of the novel. However, the undeclared attraction, passion and sexual tension between her Christ figure, Christophe, and his cousin Jan, a John the Baptist figure, is still implicitly present in the published novel. The Master of the House offers an insight into how Hall, who is wrongly assumed only to be interested in lesbian matters, negotiated a love story between men using metaphoric deities at a time when Modernist literature was rejecting religion. This paper will draw on little-known manuscript evidence to suggest that The Master of the House is an unrecognised homoromantic novel and it will argue that it deserves to be more widely known within the context of modernist period queer culture. Panel 1a | Lesbian Modernism I Elizabeth English (Cardiff Metropolitan University) Women Against the World: Margaret Goldsmith, Queer Biography, and Writing Women’s Lives. If recalled at all, the writer Margaret Goldsmith is most often noted for her brief affair with Vita Sackville-West in 1928 and possibly the novel, Belated Adventure (1929), thought to be inspired by her lover. This literary amnesia is particularly unjust when one considers the fact that Goldsmith spent a significant portion of her professional life documenting women’s lives and achievements, both historical and contemporary. Goldsmith’s career was diverse and prolific: at one time or another she worked as a government economic advisor, journalist, translator, literary agent, novelist and biographer. This paper focuses in on Goldsmith’s numerous historical biographies. Traditionally a genre deemed fitting for the Victorian female writer and reader, the biography underwent something of a revolution during the 1920s and 1930s, with Lytton Strachey’s theory of ‘new biography’ undoubtedly paving the way.1 As Robert Graves and Alan Hodge note in their memoir of those years, over two hundred biographies were published in 1930 alone.2 Biographical series such as Gerald Howe’s ‘Representative Women’ or Hogarth Press’s ‘World-Makers & World Shakers: A Series of Short Biographies’, are indicative of the genre’s popularity and the increasing appetite for women’s histories. Between 1929 and 1938 Goldsmith published 13 biographical studies, writing about such figures as Florence Nightingale, Christina of Sweden, Marie Antoinette, Madame de Stael, Sappho of Lesbos, and Maria Theresa of Austria. Goldsmith’s writing should thus be understood as part of the movement to ‘rewrite history’, as Virginia Woolf advocated in A Room of One’s Own, or to incorporate women into that exclusionary narrative.3 Examining a number of her historical biographies, this paper argues that Goldsmith delves into the annals of history to retrieve figures whose queer sexualities have been occluded or misrepresented in the past — Christina of Sweden, Sappho, Marie Antoinette, and Frederick the Great, for instance. Goldsmith retells her subjects’ stories according to a distinctly modern and sexualised agenda, framing these portraits through anachronistic lenses such as sexology and psychoanalysis and thus taking liberties with masculine concepts of historical ‘truth’ and ‘accuracy’. Such imaginative archaeological retrieval serves a dual purpose: it primarily provides the modern reader with a sense of queer sexual lineage and a greater understanding of the self, but it also tests the boundaries of how we define and construct history in relation to sexuality and gender. Panel 1b | Out of Time: Queer Temporalities Jade French (Queen Mary, University of London) Suspended Animation: Queer Temporalities and Ageing Bodies in Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women. In Djuna Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women (1915), the reader often meets her protagonists waiting, decaying and passively dying. Anchored between decadence and modernity, these women seem placed at the apex of emancipation. However, compared to the hopeful spirit embodied in contemporaneous New Woman fiction, Barnes suspends her protagonists in a never-moving present and describes them in terms of ageing. Taking these contrasts as a starting point, this paper will situate Barnes’s collection as a queer alternative to the narratives of futurity embodied in the progress orientated ‘modern’ era. Through close- reading poems in the collection and drawing on Port’s notions of ‘reverse chronologies’ and Halberstam’s theories of queer time, I will suggest Barnes debunks the privileging of youth by making her young women old. Her language of decadence subverts the trope of the beautiful muse (often coded as lesbian) dying young by embracing and subverting ‘decline’ throughout her collection. Barnes’s poetry presents a sometimes tragic but ultimately vital alternative to ‘progress’, which clears a space for both queer and ageing bodies to exist outside of a youthful, heteronormative temporality. The paper will end by tracing parallels between Barnes’s early and late poetry, suggesting that she queers temporality through a ‘suspended animation’. By freezing moments of progress, Barnes creates a twisted Bildungsroman that renders her modern women unable to mature and yet already old. Overall, I will contend that Barnes radically rethinks queer, female relationships to time through the mode of the ageing body and in doing so, addresses an intersectional identity underexplored even in modern gerontological research. Panel 1b | Out of Time: Queer Temporalities Zofia Litwinowicz (St Andrews) Queer Chronotopes in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In any literary work the notion of time is intrinsically related to the question of queer identity. According to P. Barry, queer literature, contrary to realist genres, subverts linear time narrative and introduces a plot and characters elaborated in non-cumulative and non-methodically arranged ways. This fluidity and uncertainty of time, combined with spatial anti-essentialism and deconstruction of the binary opposition between the heterosexuality and homosexuality, are vital for the establishing of queer identity. Through the unification of queer time and space, the notion of a queer chronotope appears. The term "chronotope", coined by Bakhtin, illustrates the inseparable unity of time and space, "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships". B. Keunen distinguishes teleological and dialogical chronotopes: the former move plot through conflicts towards final state of equilibrium, whereas the latter constitute a web of different axes that are juxtaposing and don't lead to any final moment.
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